Hugh Howey's Blog, page 42

More Pie, Please!

There’s been quite a few pie charts tossed around the past week. With their colored wedges and little labels, it’s easy to see these pies as something to fight over. I see something else. I see all that white space outside the pie charts where the non-readers lie. I see people beyond the crust playing video games and watching TV. I see them on Facebook and on crappy-looking author blogs. I see them bored, antsy, and wishing they could be whisked off on some exciting adventure or to some exotic locale. I see places where we need more pie.

I am not in competition with any other author. My competition is with all the things non-readers are doing. I want more readers. I’m selfish like that. I justify it by telling myself that so many people would be happier if they had a book with them at all times. They can read while waiting in lines. While at the airport. While at the beach. Over meals. In bed. Less time staring at our phones and jabbing candy, more time reading.

It’s too late for many people. They’ve already learned that they hate to read. Breaking that mentality is difficult; I know from years of wearing down friends and family. Getting a first mate on one yacht to read a book about blackjack was a huge life accomplishment for me. A young man who said he hated books devoured one in a single sitting. We just need to get the right books to the right people. And we need to do it earlier.

Three months into my job as CEO of New HarperCollins, my next big push is to grow this pie. Instead of worrying about self-publishing taking a large slice, or dwindling bookstores, or a shift to digital . . . I’m going to start planning for the book world that looms ten years from now, twenty years from now. It starts with our kids. With our parents. With our schools.

We are going to launch an initiative called π. It looks like a little penguin house, doesn’t it? Or a book standing on its jacket edges. We are going to spend millions of dollars to support youth NaNoWriMo to invest in future writers and current readers. We are going to pump money into programs like Battle of the Books. We are going to urge schools to stop teaching kids to hate books and allow them to read whatever they want. Harry Potter, Maze Runner, Sports Illustrated, Hunger Games, you name it.

This will also mean phasing out dry history books. And math books. Anything shaped like a book must be fun. Must be delicious. That’s the goal of π.

Students will learn math from Kahn Academy and similar online, scalable, teaching platforms. They will learn history with  movies and with the plethora of fun novels that take place in ancient times (Rick Riordan teaches mythology, for instance). When this next generation of kids grows up, book-shaped things will tickle their souls. They’ll want to read. Some of them will even pick up the classics that we wish they’d read sooner. But we’ll give them time.

They payoff won’t be immediate for us in the publishing world. But it will be immediate for the kids. I’ve seen classrooms where this approach is used. I’ve spoken with these kids, had pizza with these kids, have given talks at their schools. When good teachers allow their students to discover books on their own, with autonomy and no pressure, they attack reading with zeal. Many of them become lifelong readers. The pie grows for everyone.

There’s no war here. There’s nothing to fight over. There’s just empty space, people who are bored and don’t know why, a deficit of great books for every taste, and hidden potential in millions of undiscovered writers.

When we in the publishing business come at each other with trust, love, and respect, I believe we will find there’s plenty of pie to go around. Our goal should not be to point fingers or humiliate, but to lower barriers, to work for contracts that treat people like people, and to allow the great folks in publishing to do what’s right instead of what’s handed down from on high. I think we all have the same goals. We want to make readers happy. Let’s add to that goal this one: To win non-readers over every day. And let’s start with our youth. Let’s not wait until they hate books to try and convince them to give reading a chance.

Our Eggs Don’t Break

Some would call it cheating. My dad would call it “just a joke.” Either way, the crowds grew incredulous as my dad and I backed another long pace away from one another. Most of the contestants had fallen out. There was egg everywhere: yolk and splintered shells in the grass, remnants on the fronts of t-shirts, even in people’s hair.

A few of us were still in it. For many, the annual egg toss at our week-long Campmeeting retreat is the climax of Big Saturday’s games. Two lines of contestants and dozens and dozens of eggs. More than a hundred people participating and even more gawking. My dad had just caught our egg. With another two paces between us, he reared back and let fly with an underhand zing. Our white egg soared through the air, tumbling end over end, as I made ready to catch it over a hundred and fifty feet away.

The trick is to extend that catch as long as you can, to meet it high over your head and zip your hands back as quickly as you can, so that you slow the egg rather than catch it. A proper snag occurs over a very long distance. These are techniques honed over decades of Campmeetings.

Another solution, of course, is to simply hard-boil your egg. Some call this cheating. My dad found it funny. If the goal is to keep the egg intact, many might call it prudent.

Speaking of prudent, I’ve seen authors caution against putting all of our eggs in a single basket. This can refer to Amazon, where some authors opt for KDP Select and Amazon exclusivity. It can also refer to self-publishing, which people warn of doing exclusively; many think authors should go hybrid and diversify their publications. I see a huge problem with both of these eggs-in-the-same-basket arguments: Our eggs don’t break.

As a scare tactic, the eggs-in-basket approach is pretty effective. You get people worrying about their precious cargo, and suddenly they’re willing to offload it to anyone. But the analogy is flawed. As long as you own your eggs, that is.

Let’s say a new party emerges to supplant Amazon’s dominance as a book distributor. Or book streaming and lending companies become more lucrative than retailers. It doesn’t matter if all of your eggs are in the same basket; you can simply move them. It takes a few clicks. You own those eggs. Nobody can break them.

Books are now forever. Print on demand, e-books, audiobooks — they’ll never run out. And since you own them, you can re-paint them if you want. Put a new cover on those babies. Change the price. Control the DRM. Tweak the metadata. These are your eggs.

The only way to permanently put your eggs in a single basket is to give up ownership. When you sign that contract, those are no longer your eggs. For the rest of your life (plus another 70 years), those eggs belong to another. You want to get them into library baskets? You’ll need to ask permission. Maybe even beg. Want to get them streaming? Or remove DRM? Or lower the price? You don’t get to decide. Those are no longer your eggs.

Baskets come and go. Put all your eggs in the basket that treats them best. Even if that’s a single basket. Don’t let your fear of falling get in the way of your success; if your eggs go spilling, you can dust them off and try again. They won’t break. Fear-mongering can’t crack them. This invulnerability isn’t a cheat and it’s no joke; it’s just the hard-boil nature of digital distribution. So rear back and let fly. And only worry if someone is offering to buy your pretty egg for a lot less than it’s worth.

Molly Fyde and the Darkness Deep

A reader came up to me at the Savannah Book Festival and asked when the next Molly book would be out. I honestly don’t know. I have two versions of this book in draft, one of which is long and complex; the other dives right into her next adventure. It might be a month of playing around with these before I decide which direction to take it. I can tell that I was writing the first of these for myself and the other draft for the reader. After the break, you can read the opening bits of the former.

Is this on?

The table? Yes. Of course.

The Circle records everything.

But the Secretary manages the recordings. Right?

Speak freely. My office will handle the rest.

Will someone tell me why the war council has been summoned? I’m assuming you all have heard—

One war’s end does not mean the end of war, Councilman.

This is about the Human girl, right?

Astute as ever.

Careful who you insult. My Wadi was a pace longer than yours—

Now it’s a full pace?

Enough. Both of you.

I side with the Counsel of Interior. Are we really here for a single girl?

Not a single girl. There are two of them. The one who is your queen will be trouble enough, but I believe if we work together, the crown will crush what lies beneath it.

And the Human? 

My sector is erecting monuments to this girl.

Mine too.

It’ll be a religion in a matter of sleeps.

Already is.

Is it too late to simply dispatch her?

Would you douse a fire with oil?

Cultural is right. Killing her would launch a crusade.

Killing her is always an option, but we must discredit her first.

Discredit a child who ends wars? I wish you luck.

Your wish may have already been granted.

What do you have to report?

Her Wadi is dead.

The living Queen?

Those rumors have already cooled in my district.

The more provincial of districts are the last to know.

Pants of Laughter

We have the body.

The Wadi Queen’s?

No, the Human’s you idiot.

Laughter.

Yes, the Wadi Queen. It was buried on Lok.

And you have it?

I can work a shovel.

It’s truly dead?

Does this mean she is no longer a Drenard? No longer a threat?

It means she’s a Drenard in name only. Like you.

Funny.

With a dead Wadi, the fourth verse means nothing.

Exactly.

So the rest was coincidence?

Are you a believer?

Of course not.

Where is the body?

We have it.

We’ll put it on display.

Or serve it for soup.

We’ll do neither. We will encourage this cult.

Sir?

They think her incapable of dying.

And?

Let’s have them put this to a test.

 

 

 Prologue

The powerful winds of Drenard filled the Wadi Thooo’s wings, driving her high and fast through the air. Far below her lay a cracked and brightly lit landscape, canyons splitting off and rejoining, over and over, to create a world that looked from dizzying heights like a Wadi’s scales. The newly born Wadi watched as thousands of footsteps passed by with no effort, the fierce and steady gusts powering her and the other flying Wadi along.

One of her siblings screeched with a lungful of delight as he soared beside her. The three of them flooded the air with powerful scents of delight, of mixed memories from before their births, all of the thoughts and emotions swirling with the much fainter memories rising up from the ground, from the millions of other Wadi leaking their thoughts into the air.

Wrong way, one of the flying Wadi scented, a male kin, but it came as a happy observation, not a complaint. They were all too joyously alive to dare complain.

No. This is right, another scented. I feel it.

The Wadi agreed, but she was sure that it was a leftover memory, a recollection from some wingless life. They had their mother’s memories in them, leftover in a complex aroma to fill their eggs and teach them all a child should know. Among these lessons were memories of memories, ancient things, little hard stones of truth trapped among the day-to-day of surviving. Mother-of-mother truths and even older. A scent of some great journey Wadis embarked on back before wings withered to nubs. A great journey with winds at one’s back, a companion at one’s shoulder, soaring toward the center of the light, rising above the cracked earth before peeling away toward darkness. Even as these newborn Wadi soared over the home of their brethren—who were bound to the ground with their wingless backs—this Wadi was sure that this was their journey, one not taken in many a memory.

Up. Up! A sister scented, and the Wadi remembered. Not remembered, so much as knew. Deep in her bones, in the parts that get passed from mother to daughter, she knew that this was right. They were going the wrong way, but that was a brief part of the journey. Up ahead, with the two lights directly above them, the currents of wind would rise in a great, turbulent column of air. They would ride these, lifted to magnificent heights, before the powerful currents turned the other way, running in circles above the whole of their home, driving them all the way back around to the other side of a great sphere, larger than any egg could ever be, one side of which was lit, the other side bathed in darkness.

This is right, she scented the others. This is right. She flapped her mighty wings and darted forward, slicing ahead of the rushing air. The others screeched and followed, diving and turning and reveling in the freedom of life. This way, she told the others. This is where the dark Wadi go.

Writing About My Father

The first thing I ever wrote that I was truly proud of was a letter to my father. I wrote it to him on Father’s Day. I can’t remember how old I was, maybe 17? It’s all so nebulous, that period of my life. What I remember is how moved I was writing my thanks to him on that Father’s Day and how he responded to the letter. He came to me, tears in his eyes, letter in his hand, and gave me a big hug and thanked me.

I remember him looking at me a little incredulously, like he couldn’t believe I wrote that. Not the content, which I think he already knew, but the way I expressed it. Hell, it surprised even me. He let my stepmom read it, and she came to me with tears in her eyes. I already knew that words were powerful conduits through which we can convey meaning and emotion — I just never knew I had that ability.

I give my mom most of the credit for my love of literature, but my dad was always encouraging me and appreciating my stories. I shared an account of a near-death experience on my sailboat one time, and he raved for weeks and months and years about how much he loved my telling of that adventure. He has encouraged me from the beginning. I look up to my father — have always thought of him as a real-life superhero, and so writing was a way to make him proud.

My dad was my best friend for most of my childhood. I knew this early on and celebrated it and bragged about it. How many other kids considered their father their best friend? I didn’t know many. But I would get up at the crack of dawn during the summer to go farming with him. I would sit on his lap and steer his pickup truck. I would dip into his tobacco when he wasn’t looking. I would lean out the truck window and throw up soon after. I slept on the floor of the bathroom while he showered, back when I was five or six years old. I remember it like it was yesterday.

I fell in love with Amber while talking about my dad. We were at dinner. We had just met that morning, had spent the day together out on a boat I was captaining at the time. The couple that owned the boat were sitting with us on the patio of this restaurant, and Amber was doing her psychologist trick of asking pointed questions and forcing us to answer them in turn. She asked who our hero was, and when it was my turn, I started talking about my father. I got choked up. Amber reached under the table and squeezed my hand. She told me about her father. I fell in love.

It’s weird to be so close to my dad, to consider him my best friend even today, and realize that most of my books are about losing a father. My parents got divorced when I was eight or nine years old. My dad moved into a house down the street, and so began a life lived between two homes. A life of every-other-weekends. Often it was every weekend. We spent a lot of time together. It wasn’t like he was off on another planet. But you would never know that looking over my body of work.

The first book I ever wrote was about a girl named Molly who lost her dad. She spends four entire novels trying to find him, to be reunited with him. Juliette’s relationship with her father is a central theme in Wool. The final scene of that book was written fairly early in the process — I think while writing part 2 of Wool. All of that plot and adventure culminates in what she decides to do on the final page. And then there’s Sand, where a father’s disappearance tears a family apart and eventually brings them back together.

I don’t think any of this is an accident. I love my dad. I missed him. I think I spend a lot of time writing about how much I missed him. We didn’t have to be dysfunctional for that to motivate my art. We just were who we were.

One of my fondest childhood memories I have of my dad was during this freak snowstorm in Monroe, North Carolina. My dad knew people wouldn’t drive carefully enough with the roads covered in snow. So he threw a chain into the back of his pickup, grabbed two pairs of work gloves, bundled me up, and off we went, driving aimlessly around town. Sure enough, we came across cars in ditches, the owners stranded. This was before cell phones. Way before. Dad would pull up and tell these people that he’d have them out “in a jiffy.”

He’d let me out, and the two of us would spin the locks on the front tires to put the truck in four-wheel-drive. I was so proud that I knew how to do this. Then I’d tug on those too-big gloves and wave him back as he put the truck in reverse and backed down into the ditch to line up with the front of the stricken car. He’d hand me the chain, and I’d dive down under the bumper, looking for something solid to wrap it around. The truck would lurch and growl, but we always got the vehicles back on the road. My dad could do anything.

But what he did next was my biggest lesson, and the thing that makes me strive to be like him every single day. The owners of these cars would fish a few bills out of their wallets, sometimes every bit of what they had in there, and try to pay my dad. And he always refused. Waved them off. Threw that chain back in the bed of the truck with a clack and rattle, knocked the snow off my jacket, told me to get back in and to mind the mud on my boots, and then we were off again, looking for someone else in trouble, not a care of our own between us.

I don’t thank my father enough for inspiring me to be a better person. I write about him in all of my books. Always missing. Always distant. But that wasn’t how he lived. He was always there and still is. I guess even with all that time together, it was never enough. And that’s what I write about.

The NYT and WSJ Best Seller Lists Must Die

This is a guest post by Tim Grahl, founder of Out:think, where he helps authors connect with readers and sell more books. Tim is also the author of Your First 1000 Copies: The Step-by-Step Guide to Marketing Your Book.

By most standards, I’m still new to the publishing industry. It’s been just five years since I worked on my first book launch campaign, but since that time I’ve worked with over 100 authors in just about every marketing capacity you can imagine. I’ve played the role of publicist, community organizer, web developer, social media expert and on and on.

In various roles I’ve bumped into the  New York Times and Wall Street Journal best seller lists many times. I’ve helped launch two #1 New York Times best sellers, several top five best sellers and, at one point last spring, had 5 clients with books on the NYT list at the same time. While I haven’t tracked the Wall Street Journal list as closely, I’ve had quite a few hit that list as well.

I also have my hands in a few launches right now – some finishing up and some just getting prepped for later this year – and more and more I’ve become incredulous at the complete disaster that is the major best seller lists.

As I’ve prepped to write this article, I’ve had trouble organizing all of my thoughts, data, stories and sources into one cohesive narrative, so instead I’ve decided to list point-by-point in no particular order, the things that I’ve either personally witnessed or directly experienced with one of my clients or colleagues in the publishing industry.

My goal is to shed some light on what really goes on with the two top best seller lists – Wall Street Journal and New York Times – and give some information for authors that are hoping to hit it one day.

Here goes.

1. Why does it matter? It’s true, the best seller lists are becoming obsolete. There are plenty of books that, despite never gracing the pages of the WSJ or NYT go on to sell lots of copies and have a great fan base.

However, being a New York Times or Wall Street Journal best seller can greatly enhance your career.

Since the publishing industry still shows great deference to the lists, it’ll significantly impact an advance on your next book contract.

If you’re a non-fiction author, particularly business books, it means more speaking gigs, higher consulting rates, etc.

It means more sales. If your book is a best seller, it all of a sudden gets more face time on book store shelves and other promotions. It’s a self-feeding system.

It means more appearances in the media. NYT best sellers get phone calls and emails from the media.

And let’s face it, it matters because it’s pretty damn cool to be a New York Times and Wall Street Journal best seller.

But the bottom line, especially if have anything to do with the traditional publishing industry:

WSJ/NYT best seller = more money for authors/publishers/agents.

2. What is a best selling book? If you ask a typical person this question who has not descended into the muck of the behind-the-scenes on the best seller lists, they’ll of course answer something like “It’s a book that has sold the best.” or “It’s a book that has sold the most copies.”

How naive.

Here’s a brief intro to how it works. Further points will go deeper into some aspects of it.

Wall Street Journal Best Seller List

WSJ builds their list based on the sales figures from Nielson’s BookScan. In general, if you sell the most books in a category as reported by BookScan, you will hit #1 in that category in the Wall Street Journal best seller list.

Makes sense right?

Well, BookScan doesn’t track all purchases. It doesn’t include sales through some big box stores such as Wal-mart and Sams Club, which won’t affect most of us. However, it also doesn’t include sales from CreateSpace and other self-publishing platforms.

But, overall, it’s the most accurate and reports about 75–85% of book sales, depending on who you ask.

More on the WSJ later.

New York Times Best Seller List

A mystery wrapped in a riddle as the saying goes.

NYT keeps a tight lid on their process for selecting best sellers. They sample their own list of certain book sellers across the country, which is a tightly guarded secret, and then look at the data with their wise NYT brains and decide who they think should be on the list.

It’s said this is done to keep people from gaming the system, which is partially true. But it’s also done so that the New York Times can have a say on which books get the extra credibility of being a best seller.

I’m certainly not the only one that sees potential problems with this system.

Remember: NYT/WSJ list = more money.

So a small group of people look at highly selective data to decide who they deem important enough to be called a best seller.

At this point we’ve come a pretty far way from “the books that sell the most copies”.

We’ve now laid some ground work so I can share the really weird stuff.

3. Who does the NYT love? A friend of mine has access to the weekly Nielson BookScan numbers – that organization that tracks 75–85% of book sales. Last year he decided to go back and compare BookScan numbers to the NYT best seller list and see if he could find anything interesting.

Since NYT does their own secret reporting and choosing, he wanted to see if he could find any sign of bias.

Here’s two conclusions he came to from his own personal search comparing real BookScan sales figures to the books deemed by NYT staff to be best sellers:

If you happen to work for the New York Times and have a book out, your book is more likely to stay on the list longer and have a higher ranking than books not written by New York Times employees.
If you happen to have written a conservative political leaning book, you’re more likely to be ranked lower and drop off the list faster than those books with a more liberal political slant.

4. Why the separate lists for digital and print? From an author’s standpoint, this is maddening. I’ve been involved with book launches that have sold more than enough copies to hit the best seller lists, but because the numbers were split between digital and print, they didn’t make it.

How arcane.

In what world does it make sense that as a reader, it matters whether I buy the book in paper or digital? I still bought the book. I still thought it was worth the money. But for some reason, the NYT and WSJ lists think paper counts as a sale more than digital.

Arcane is the only nice word that can be used.

Readers aren’t concerned about modality, why are the best seller lists?

5. How to launder your book purchases. Let me change gears here and give at least one reason established lists have to make so many weird rules.

The best seller lists are forced to jump through a lot of hoops because people are constantly trying to game the system.

If I’m a rich person and publish a book, what’s to stop me from just buying 20,000 copies of my own book and putting myself on the list? I think we can all agree, while we want the best seller lists to reflect the best selling books, we don’t want people to be able to buy their way onto the lists either, right? So the best seller lists try to put some checks and balances in place to make sure people can’t do this.

So what happens? Book launderers start popping up. How does book laundering work? Let me explain:

Step 1. Find a book laundering firm. There’s a handful of them out there, ResultSource is the most well known.

Step 2. Write them a check for their fee. They don’t work for free afterall.

Step 3. Write them another check – for your books. This check is to buy copies of your book. It depends on the campaign, but it’ll number in the thousands. We’re trying to hit the best seller lists afterall.

Step 4. The firm launders the sales. It hires people all over the country to buy books through various retailers one-at-a-time with different credit cards, shipping addresses and billing addresses. This allows the sales to go through and show up as individual sales instead of bulk purchases which then get reported to Nielson BookScan.

Step 5. Pop the champagne. You’re now a best seller.

If you think I’m making this stuff up, I have two sources:

The Wall Street Journal itself.
I’m friends with someone who used to work for one of these firms and headed up the book laundering side of the business. The person quit when they were sick of the ethical and moral issues with the entire operation. This person explained the whole system to me.

6. What about bulk purchases? Now we’re getting into a truely gray areas.

Up to this point, I think we can all agree on two things:

Individual sales should count. If I walk into a book store or logon to Amazon.com and purchase a copy of Dust, that should count to the best seller lists.
Huge bulk purchases from the author shouldn’t count. If Hugh decides to order 10,000 copies of Dust, that shouldn’t automatically put him on the best seller list.

But what about in between?

What if an online book club wants to purchase 50 copies of your book for everyone in their group? Should those count as 50 individual copies or one bulk purchase?

What if one of your clients is bringing you in to speak to their entire department of 108 people and wants to buy a copy for everyone in attendance? Should that count as 108 individual copies or one bulk purchase?

What if an association wants to buy a copy of your book for each one of their chapters that are in a couple hundred cities across the United States? Should those count as a couple hundred individual sales or one bulk purchase?

What if someone wants to buy 10 copies of your book to give away as Christmas presents? Should that count as 10 individual copies or one bulk purchase?

What if a company wants to buy 1000 copies of your book to giveaway to all their new clients over the next two years? Should that count as 1000 individual copies or one bulk purchase?

Here’s where it really starts to get fuzzy. In each of these cases individual people are getting a copy of the book. Sure, they may not read it, but how may books line your book shelves that you’ve never gotten around to reading?

Different people will have different opinions on each of these scenarios.

If I’ve worked hard to build a fan base or client base that will purchase multiple copies of my book, shouldn’t I get credit for those?

But if I, as an author, go around and buy copies of my book in multiples of 50 and 100 and then put them in my garage, those probably shouldn’t count.

This is where the best seller lists run into trouble. It’s extremely hard to police this sort of thing. What would you do?

7. How to buy your way onto the best seller list. We’ve already talked about the book laundering scheme, but here’s another way to pull off the best seller list with brute, monetary force.

I was brought in to play a small role on a book launch a few years ago. Leading up to the launch date, I was on a few conference calls that were outlining strategy for hitting the NYT and WSJ best seller lists for a book.

Here’s a few things the author did to make it happen:

Hired two high-end book publicists to get him booked on as many television interviews as possible.
Purchased full page ads in national and local papers across the country.
Ran advertising in Times Square in New York City.
Paid the fee for the book’s publisher to have the book placed on the front tables at Barnes & Noble.
This is my favorite. He hired people all over the country to go into their local Barnes & Noble and purchase every copy of the book one-at-a-time with cash.

Did it work? Yes. The book debuted on the NYT and WSJ best seller lists.

Of course the following week the book dropped off the list and was never seen again. 95% of sales happened the first week. But the author, for all time, can be referred to as a “New York Times best selling author”.

WSJ/NYT best seller = more money.

8. It’s the good, hard working authors that get screwed. As I type this, there’s a whole shift happening inside the best seller lists. I’ve been on calls with people at two major publishers and they can’t seem to give me a straight answer on how books are being reported and what is making the lists.

They can’t tell me, because they don’t know.

They don’t know, because the lists keep changing the rules without telling anyone.

Apparantly the WSJ list has tightened it’s rules on bulk purchases. A recent book supposedly sold enough indiviudal copies to make the list, but then was thrown out because they also had a lot of bulk copies. This, of course, makes no sense but, as an author, you’re at their mercy.

One of my clients has worked really hard to establish great relationships with their clients who are now interested in buying the author’s new book in bulk. But with the new rules, we’re not sure what to do. Go ahead and let them order and potentially get the book blacklisted? This author has done the work ahead of time to make the book successful with the goal of hitting one of the major lists and now it could very well be for naught.

When the rules are fuzzy, hidden and constantly changing, what can you possibly do?

9. Unkept promises. Awhile ago a colleague of mine wanted to run a campaign to his platform for his new book. He checked with his publisher to see if they could take the orders through his site, so he could give special bonuses to early purchasers and still get them counted through one of the major book chains.

The publisher checked on it and said they could. He asked if they were sure. They said yes.

The author ran his campaign, sold thousands of books and then turned in all the names and orders to his publisher. They sent the list to the retailer. The retailer decided they didn’t want to do it. Since the publishers have made the retailers their customers instead of the readers, they didn’t want to push to hard so they caved and told the author “sorry” but there was nothing they could do.

Huge investment of time, money and effort to become a NYT and WSJ best selling author. Time, money and effort that had paid off in enough sales, got thrown out and never saw the light of day.

10. Your book isn’t quite good enough. Hugh’s Dust sold over 50,000 copies in it’s first week and only debuted at #7 even though it far, far outsold books that were higher on the list.

Why?

Fantastic question. Apparantly the people making the decisions about which books are selling the best (notice the contradiction there?) didn’t think Dust was quite good enough.

This is the problem having a hidden group of people be highly selective with their data. Real numbers don’t matter anymore.

11. Your book wasn’t purchased at the cool book stores. Here’s another WSJ article for you to take a look at. It’s short but to the point.

The New York Times samples different stores across the country and weights the books based on where they are purchased.

What does this mean?

A hardcover of your book purchased on Amazon.com is counted differently than the same hardcover book purchased at indie bookstore X.

At this point do I really have to comment on how ridiculous this is and how it punishes authors and readers alike?

12. What can be done now? As authors, what can be done with this?

WSJ/NYT list = more money.

It’s hard to ignore that, but we must. The only answer to this debacle is to stop worrying about the major best seller lists.

At this point, the results are so far outside of an author’s direct control, that it doesn’t make sense to make them a goal anymore.

Instead, focus on the reader. Make your book available at the stores your readers buy books in the formats they buy them. Make it easy to buy and easy to read.

Don’t make the lists your customer. Keep the reader your customer.

Luck and Lottery

I received a private message from a writer whom I greatly admire (and consider a friend) who is concerned about my rallying cry for people to self-publish. I understand how that message shines brighter than my caveats and warnings, so I want to devote an entire blog post to something you’ll see in practically every one of my advice and how-to and rah-rah posts. These caveats are even there in that big report that everyone’s talking about. Here we go:

Self-publishing is not a gold rush.

Success at writing requires, in addition to long hours and hard work, a lot of luck.

Check out my advice to aspiring writers, there on the left hand side of the front page. Check every interview I’ve ever given and any blog post where I mention what authors should expect. I’ve beaten this drum louder and longer than any other drum, including my love of self-publishing. I say it all the time. You have to write because you love it. You can’t expect to make a living at this. Luck is involved. Most won’t make it.

Do I have to keep saying it? It’s right there in the survey. Anyone with an advanced degree should be able to find it.My traditionally published friends have either forgotten how hard it was for them to get published, were among the few who had it happen rapidly, or got through the gates back when publishers took on more debut authors. Because what I hear from them sounds like this:

“Why would you suggest people self-publish when they can just do what I did? Put their books in bookstores?”

Because it isn’t that easy, and you all should know that. It gets harder every day. Meanwhile, the advantages of self-publishing increase every day. Print on demand and e-books means zero risk, zero warehousing, nearly zero production costs, nothing but an investment in time. In the three years it can take to land an agent, get a book deal, and see that book to market, you can write and self-publish six or ten quality novels. Or just one, if that’s what makes you happy.

There’s no guarantee you’ll get rich from self-publishing. There’s less guarantee you’ll get rich from querying agents. My contention is this: Most people will be happier getting their works out in the wild and moving on to the next project than they will reading rejection letters. We don’t see these stories. Those writers gave up and went back to their other lives. DBW’s survey doesn’t count the people who tried and didn’t make it. It’s like that option — failing at traditional publishing — doesn’t exist.

The dichotomy presented to aspiring writers by my trad-pubbed friends and the Shatzkins of the world is this: You can self publish with the unwashed masses, or you can have your book on an endcap or in the window of a Barnes & Noble. Choose.

That’s bullshit. I’m sorry, it just is. The real choice is that 99% of you can write a novel, pour your heart into it, and watch as every agent you query rejects the thing. And then you can give up. Feel like a failure. Walk away from your dream.

Or you can self-publish, have the pride of having done so, hold a copy of a physical book you wrote in your hands, see your e-book up on Amazon, get a sale or two, hear from a reader, and want to write more.

It isn’t about getting rich. It’s about having the opportunity to feel pride of accomplishment.

So why do I talk about money and earnings? Because the chance that you’ll get lucky and make a living at this is better if you self-publish. The freedom to write new and exciting stories, to price your work right, to give away copies, to earn 5.6 times the royalties, to change the cover if it isn’t working, to wait ten years for a story to take off, all of these improve your chances of winning the lottery.

Again, no guarantees. But 99% of the trad-route people will never sell a single novel. They’ll never get published. And if my agent’s stats on her slushpile are indicative, it’s more like 99.9% will fail. No one counts these people. This egregious error is why the DBW report will never say anything useful about the writing profession. Never. Impossible. Not a single useful fact will come from that survey. It’s worse than wrong, because it’s misleading. It ignores the 99% of people who try and give up.

When we look at sales data for the top 7,000 genre e-books, we are digging down into the midlist and doing it equally. Some of these books are ranked 50,000+ in the overall Kindle store. Keep in mind that these are daily snapshots. New books are coming into this fold all the time, and existing books are dropping out. We’re seeing the middle class of writing success. And what’s mind-blowingly-brilliant about this data is that it has already moved self-publishing into a position of equality.

Think about that. Self-publishing was the ghetto two years ago. Hell, two weeks ago. And now you have DBW saying that the earning potential between self-publishing and traditional publishing is about equal. Maybe there’s a slight edge to indies, but it’s only slight.

Awesome. Happy dance. Progress. Amazing.

Yes, the results of any writing study will show that it doesn’t pay well. It doesn’t. I have never said it did, or that it was easy, but guess what it has become? Easier. Much, much easier. And we’ve only been at this for a handful of years. In a handful of years, we’ve gone from vanity wannabes to sitting at the same table, eating from the same bread, and even taking (slightly) larger pieces.

Happy writing, everyone.

Print: Not all it’s cracked up to be.

It hit me in the summer of 2012. That’s when I realized print was on the way out and digital was here to stay. And it was major publishers who taught me this.

At the time, I was doing very well with Wool. It had hit the NYT list a couple times, had sold hundreds of thousands of copies, and the Ridley Scott film deal was in place. I live a simple life, so I had more money than I needed. It put me in a generous mood. To my agent’s dismay, I told her that I would give my print rights to a publisher for a song. As long as they only got the print rights.

No dice. Nobody wanted the print rights. But they would give me $1,500,000 for the print PLUS the digital.

So, Print = $0

Print + Digital = $1,500,000

As has been soundly demonstrated by industry veterans in recent days, I’m a college dropout and a dumb hick, but I could see some sort of truth in these offers I was getting. Digital was worth something. Print wasn’t worth much.

Holly Ward, who is very likely the #1 indie author in the world right now, concurs. She says:

Someone asked about paper only deals – NO ONE IS INTERESTED. I thought that was insane, but it’s not. It lines up with Hugh’s report. Paper is not where the money is at- ebooks are… I’m thinking there is a reason why the trad pubs are backing off of paper sales. It’s not arbitrary, despite their other actions I think they’re right about paper.

If Indies stopped chasing paper, if they stopped thinking that paper would be the difference, well, that would be major.”

There’s a great thread here about Holly turning down major deals from publishers and why. Fantastic read.

Today on AuthorEarnings.com, we posted some charts and thoughts on self-published authors giving up print sales. Turns out that traditionally published authors are giving up even more.

From the Indie Side

You Have to be a Little Crazy

5 o’clock in the morning. Been up for two hours, jetlagged like mad. Uploading SAND to Nook, B&N, and iTunes. While files are uploading, I’m firing off Tweets, making an update to AuthorEarnings.com, handling e-mail, and daydreaming about the next writing project.

How do you get a bunch of stuff done? You do a bunch of stuff. The last two weeks have been spent working on that earnings report, traveling to Taiwan and promoting two novels there, finalizing a children’s book deal, discussing film rights for SAND, and wrapping up this apocalyptic anthology, which releases in three weeks.

No social life helps. Being batshit crazy is practically a necessity. Now it’s back to iTunes to get this SAND pre-order page up. (Is it sick that I feel like I haven’t released a title in practically forever? I think it’s sick.)

AuthorEarnings.com

So, the reason my site just crashed is because of a little project I’ve been working on with a friend of mine. We broke street date a day early, as my co-founder and I cracked beers over Skype to celebrate the launch of AuthorEarnings.com and the publication of our first report, and down went all the pretty toys.

This project started a little less than two weeks ago, when a programmer emailed me to share some data he’d pulled from Amazon’s bestseller lists. It painted a picture of indie publishing even more optimistic than my rainbow-and-unicorn fantasies. He asked if I wanted to help him present the data. I told him I was underqualified, but I’d give it a go.

I’ve been working on this while on book tour in Taiwan, jetlagged all to hell, but several people gave wonderful suggestions, and my partner and I are extremely proud of the result. We approached some media outlets to run this, as it’s too big a deal for my blog, and we heard that it was too long for their site, that it wouldn’t interest their readers, and so on. Which was perfect, because my hope all along was to create a site dedicated to this data and this report. Which is what we did. We just didn’t rent a big enough server.

Should be coming back online as we speak. I’ll have more to say about the data as the storm settles. Peace.